A Return to Kautsky and Liebknecht for the SPD?
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ALB wrote: ” I think the early Party members regarded the SPD pre-WW1 … as: while not a socialist party at least a “party with socialists in it.” ”
I suppose we’d have to ask – ‘just who in the pre-Great War SPD believed in workers democratically controlling all social production?’
Kautsky certainly didn’t; neither did Bernstein. If we can’t name someone, at least, then it would appear that ‘the early Party members’ were wrong then, and that the present Party members, too, are still wrong now, to regard the SPD as anything whatsoever to do with ‘revolutionary socialism’, as we in the 21st century would understand it.
Perhaps you know more about Liebknecht than I do, ALB, and can provide some quotes from him, which would allow us to name one. I must say, though, that from what I know of ‘Marxist Socialists’ after Marx’s death, I’ll be very surprised to hear of any SPD ‘socialists’.
I think that the disaster of 1914 could have been foreseen, by any socialists who had a proper basis in Marx’s ideas, of the necessity for the self-emancipation of the proletariat. The SPD never had any intention in allowing the German workers to ‘self-emancipate’. alan’s list, above, says it all.
Edward Bernstein was Marx archivists
“..I think that the disaster of 1914 could have been foreseen, by any socialists who had a proper basis in Marx’s ideas…”
And indeed it was…by the SPGB whose observers to the 2nd International saw through it and recommended the SPGB should not affiliate. 😛
But LBird, equally you must explain why the likes of Luxemburg and Pannekoek who had critiqued elitism and stuck with the SPD until the middle of the war before joining with Kautsky and arch-revisionist Bernstein to form the Independent Socialists.
What was it that Luxemburg and Pannekoek recognize which meant they declined to break with the SPD?
I suggested that it was a class party, something you challenged. But I emphasized that it incorporated a class view on all aspects of everyday life from music to drama, to literature and journalism, to sports and social activities where play-writers became presidents in Bavaria’s Workers Republic.
The Party had become the class, dissolving the separation between politics and people. Culture and politics merged (as they again did during the Russian Revolution).
Their aspiration was in the name – social democracy.
We can learn lessons from the failures and one was and has to be the organizational structure where they devoted too much importance upon full-time careerists who did usurp power from the members. Pannekoek himself drifted away from the idea of mass parties to workers councils. Did he throw the baby out with the bath-water? The SPGB says he did. Our organization implemented countervailing ideas of decision-making in the hope of not replicating the errors of the past.
He will be looking for the pussy hair in the soup in his entire life
I have been a militant of several organization in my entire life, and I have seen many organization going up and down. The SPGB has stayed for so many years because it has learned from the past and it is not going to repeat the mistakes made by others organizations, they can call us whatever hell they want, but we are still there for more than 100 years. Peoples are not machines and they change their minds, and I have seen that for a period of more than 50 years. Rosa Luxembourg wrote a very good book about reformism and revolution and she ended up supporting reformism and elitism and the conspiracy theory
The “radicals” in the SPD attributed its drift towards reformism as being due not so much to the bureaucratisation of the Party (after all Luxemburg and Pannekoek were at one time paid Party officials themselves) as to the fact that the SPD was the only party firmly committed to introducing political democracy in Germany and that this attracted the support, in both members and votes, from radical bourgeois democrats who wanted this rather than socialism. I don’t know how much there is in this nor how the SPD could have avoid advocating political democracy. Even Luxemburg regarded the proletariat as having to take up the torch of political democracy that the bourgeoisie had abandoned.
Speaking of her, there were only two SPD members whose articles were translated and published in the early Socialist Standard: her and Kautsky (the Party’s first three pamphlets were a translation authorised by him of most of his introduction to the Erfurt Programme).
I recall having a debate with now ex-member of the SPGB (DD) when I was a non-member while he and I were in the IWW together about the policy of paid officials. He was very much in favour.
Having experienced full-time union officers, I am still very reticent about them without the strictest means of control. AGMs and elections fall short of holding the reins over a well-entrenched layer of union officials.
I recall someone who studied the revived CNT that he had no knowledge of any recall and thought such rules to be a token gesture, mere lip-service.
We too have had that debate within the SPGB about paid officers. If we were a mass party then it will mean for efficient administration having paid duties rather than reliance on volunteers. When we have hundreds, nay, thousands of members who are dependent upon the SPGB for their income, then we too will face the challenge of ensuring we are not hi-jacked by those who Upton Sinclair described ” It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I trust by then we will have in place the ways and means of retaining members democracy.
I think regard to attitudes when I suggested they were anti-elite, it was their political strategy of Mass Strikes to give the initiative to the working class organisations themselves rather than the political incumbents of Parliament. Luxemburg fell victim to her anti-leadership principle. Like all leaders she actually followed the popular movement, even when it was suicidal as it was with the Spartacists. (And later with the KAPD in the 1921 March Action)
But I am also reminded of that maxim that reasonable minds can draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. Nothing wrong with comradely disagreement.
Robert Michels’s 1911 book, Political Parties, in which he propounded his “iron law of oligarchy”, according to which democratic control of large organisations such as mass political parties and trade unions was not possible, was largely based on a study of the SPD of which he had been a member even of its radical wing and a parliamentary candidate (resigning in 1907) . He later, logically enough in a sense, became a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party (arguing that charismatic leaders represented the masses better). Even so, there are some interesting insights in his book as to how the SPD was organised and operated. Essential reading for anyone who wants to go into this in detail.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “But LBird, equally you must explain why the likes of Luxemburg and Pannekoek who had critiqued elitism and stuck with the SPD until the middle of the war before joining with Kautsky and arch-revisionist Bernstein to form the Independent Socialists.
What was it that Luxemburg and Pannekoek recognize which meant they declined to break with the SPD?”
I’m afraid even Tories ‘critique elitism’ when it suits. The question is: ‘did they argue for the democratic control of all production by workers?’, and hence attempt to build party ideas, methods and structures that developed that aim.
As for the ‘Independent Socialists’, the same questions apply, as to the SPD. The splits and re-alignments between various ‘leaders’ and factions were nothing to do with the issue of workers’ democratic control of production.
I’m most familiar with Pannekoek’s views, and he seems to have been very similar to Engels – some of his writing is Marxist (he argued that the laws of physics were a human product, and so, presumably, amenable to democratic control), but some falls back into echoing Engels’ 18th century ‘materialism’ (ie. ‘matter’, not humans, produces ‘reality’, and so is not amenable to democratic control). Neither Engels nor Pannekoek squared this particular political circle. Marx, of course, did – to him, humans, as the active subject, the conscious creator, socially produce their objects, and thus can change them.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “I suggested that it was a class party, something you challenged. But I emphasized that it incorporated a class view on all aspects of everyday life from music to drama, to literature and journalism, to sports and social activities where play-writers became presidents in Bavaria’s Workers Republic.
The Party had become the class, dissolving the separation between politics and people. Culture and politics merged (as they again did during the Russian Revolution).”
This is simply untrue. A ‘class view’ would suggest an organisation (party or council) which was built upon the notion of democratic control by its worker membership, and all its ideas and activities were premised upon that political belief. No workers were taught by the SPD that they, and they alone (to the exclusion of the party managers, etc., that you listed earlier) should democratically control ‘all aspects of everyday life’ (ie. theirs). For example, were workers taught to critique and change the laws of football, and encouraged to elect any officials (and remove any who failed to obey the workers instructions) within the game? This political method applies to all the examples you give.
The SPD, like all bourgeois parties, may have a majority of workers for members, but those workers don’t democratically control the party leaders, party machine or party ideas. You’ve said as much yourself already.
The SPD and Independent Socialists were not workers’ parties. They might have contained politicians who were sympathetic to workers, but that’s a long way from those politicians doing as they are told by workers, politically and intellectually, according to democratic controls.
The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I
These are the complete works of Rosa Luxembourg published and edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson ( Volume 1 )
ALB wrote: “The “radicals” in the SPD attributed its drift towards reformism as being due not so much to the bureaucratisation of the Party (after all Luxemburg and Pannekoek were at one time paid Party officials themselves) …”
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they! 🙂
Did Luxemburg or Pannekoek, when they were ‘paid Party officials’, ie bureaucrats, argue that they must obey their electorate? As I said before, I’m more familiar with Pannekoek’s ideas, and he wasn’t consistent. Given his social upbringing, and lack of political clarity, it’s difficult to believe that ‘reformism’ in the party wasn’t connected to his attempts to ‘reform’ workers into seeing the world from his perspective, as opposed to encouraging them to create their own.
Until a workers’ party starts out from the premise that workers should democratically control it, institutionally and intellectually, then I can’t see how it can be ‘socialist’. This applies, of course, to that party’s view of ‘nature’ and ‘science’, too. There can’t be a ‘special elite’ who claim to have a ‘special method’, which gives them, and them alone, insights into a ‘reality’ that the vast majority cannot share. It’s only when when workers argue for our own control of ‘reality-for-us’ (or, ‘nature-for-us’), a social product, that we’ll begin the task of undermining the world/universe we live in, one built by the bourgeoisie, by its ideas, aims, and purposes, not ours.
Thanks for the links, I’ll read them later.
ALB wrote: “Here‘s one on/by Luxemburg …”
Quote by Luxemburg, from ALB’s link: “…a tremendous under-estimation of the enlightening and elevating intellectual influences which 40 years of Socialist propaganda have produced in the ranks of the German working class.” [my bold]
With due regard to the circumstances of this claim, and its rhetorical context, but given the later events of 1914, I think that we can only conclude that it was Rosa herself who was guilty of over-estimation of the effects of this (supposed?) ‘Socialist propaganda’.
As I argued to alan earlier, the ‘Socialism’ of the SPD (and all Second International thinkers) had very little to do with Marx’s notion of ‘the self-emancipation of the proletariat’. It would be very hard to believe, that if the European proletariat had been ‘enlightened and elevated’ for 40 years, that it would have marched off to war and mass suicide under the banner of nationalism.
In fact, all the evidence since supports the view that there was no mass proletarian self-conversion to democratic socialism anywhere, neither in Germany nor in the other combatant nations.
Even after four years of terrible killing at the front and starvation at home, still the German proletariat hadn’t learned to rely upon itself, but handed political power to the counterrevolutionary SPD.
No matter how much we admire Rosa Luxemburg and her bravery which caused her death at the hands of the proto-fascists, we have to learn the lessons of the late 19th century – regarding not just politics (and Marx’s ideas) but also those of physics, logic, mathematics and ‘science’, which in many ways are all still in a state of unresolved crisis.
Any attempt to save this planet and all its life forms is going to require a thorough-going revolution in all areas of humanity’s activities, its social production. And if it’s not democratic socialism, the ‘Solution’ will be an ‘elite’ one. Perhaps Engels’ ‘Finality’ will bear fruit, but not in the sense he anticipated, but one of which we’ve already had a terrible taste.
A 1907 analysis of the SPD by the SPGB
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-lessons-of-german-elections-1907.html
alanjjohnstone wrote: “A 1907 analysis of the SPD by the SPGB
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-lessons-of-german-elections-1907.html”
It’s a very good article, alan, which argues in favour of many of the things that I’ve said about workers’ class consciousness and self-emancipation.
Socialist Standard March 1907 wrote: “…where the workers once attain full class-consciousness they can no longer be misled…value election campaigns and political representation only in so far as they are a means for rousing the workers to full class consciousness…socialising the means of production…Insisting upon the truth that the working-class must emancipate itself …What the workers (and that means the whole of Society) will do after the proletariat have seized control…organising the workers in the political and economic field on the lines of the class struggle alone, would offer a united front of revolutionary hostility to the possessing class… ”.
But, there is one glaring omission: other than within a quote from Vorwaerts, the article itself doesn’t mention ‘democracy’, never mind “workers’ democracy”.
As I’ve said before, I think that this failure to emphasise that the workers themselves will collectively determine their own world was a feature of all Second International parties, and seems to also include the SPGB. That is, it’s not membership of that International that’s at the root of the problem, but something deeper, that all the post-Marx “Socialist” organisations seemed to share.
Put simply, it’s the ideological belief that ‘matter itself’ (and most emphatically not humanity, not the social producers) produces our reality. This is a belief that stems from Engels, not Marx, and means that when talking about workers’ reality, there is no need to discuss the democratic control required when creating whatever ‘reality’ we know.
It’s a shame that the article omits this central political question, because, compared to today’s articles from all parties, it’s much more advanced. Perhaps it just shows the deterioration after 1883 has continued to weaken Marx’s original ideas. The faith in Engels’ ‘Scientific Socialism’ must be opposed by ‘Workers’ Democracy’.
The problem is, I’ve come to realise that it’s the word ‘Scientific’ that seems to attract most post-Marx ‘socialists’, and not ‘Democracy’. If asked what should determine our Universe, our Physics, our Reality, these ‘socialists’ influenced by Engels will always answer ‘Science’, not ‘Democracy’.
And Engels got his notions of ‘science’ from Robert Owens (a well-documented autocrat, who wanted to help workers, not be under their control), and overlaid Marx’s core ideas of ‘democracy’, ‘social production’ and ‘critique’, with an elite ‘science’ which studied eternal matter to produce a final ‘Truth’.
But, there is one glaring omission: other than within a quote from Vorwaerts, the article itself doesn’t mention ‘democracy’, never mind “workers’ democracy”.
As I’ve said before, I think that this failure to emphasise that the workers themselves will collectively determine their own world was a feature of all Second International parties, and seems to also include the SPGB.
It is all over our articles and in our DOP.
The word Democracy and workers democracy has been mentioned thousands of times by the SPGB
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